Common Mistake: Believing Social Control Media Will Document Your Writings/Thoughts and Search Engines Like Google Will Help You Find These
When the Web is an ocean of garbage we need better garbage-collecting capabilities
Social Control Media, as we pointed out earlier, is going offline. There are issues aside from costs and liabilities; many instances or sites just give up and go offline. This happens every day somewhere in the world. Most of the time we just don't hear about it or sites "unofficially" throw in the towel (like JoinDiaspora did; it never offered an outward migration route as it had promised, that was just vapourware).
Many news sites wrongly assumed that posting directly to Twitter - i.e. outsourcing - would be acceptable. That didn't age well (some of them got more traffic via/from/in Twitter than their own site; then Twitter died). The same goes for police departments, politicians and so on. Whose terrible idea was it? Sharecropping is for serfs. They enriched other people and helped them herd the masses.
Having just mentioned Google getting worse, let's take a moment to elaborate on that.
Many people, not only publishers or some online authors (e.g. bloggers), complain that Google tries to swallow other people's work and then reproduce it not using links (attribution, traffic sharing) but LLM slop, instead. Others point out that Google no longer crawls as deeply as before, nor does it index and present much older pages. Google is cutting its bills by abandoning a commitment it never had: organising the Web.
Over time sites will learn to do their own search, not just their own research (forget about Google; it's slop, it's nonsense). Google used to be synonymous with search. It ought not be.
Here in Techrights we're working on doing search our own way. Leaving another party to do that means facilitating control by a potentially hostile party, which can omit/censor pages (or downrank/prohibit certain topics). What we're building is versatile:
It only takes a few milliseconds to perform a search. It covers about 50,000 pages, not counting comments. If you don't build (or deploy) your own, or put another way if you let somebody else do that, then you're under the control or some other party, which may become more hostile over time or simply go offline.
In Geminispace, it's often said that "organising" things using a large search engine or authoritative (maybe authoritarian) site/capsule would be a grave mistake - basically replicating some of the same problems the Web has.
In the age of LLM slop, wherein many sites are polluted with slop and it's not trivial to detect on the spot (for instance, someone just searches Google and lands in some unfamiliar domain of unknown provenance), it'll make sense to focus on few particular trusted sites, then search internally. █